Examine the Human Experience Through Great Works of Literature
The Summer Humanities Scholars Program offers rising high school seniors an intensive, four-week, on-campus introduction to college-level humanities. This is a non-credit program; students will receive a certificate of participation upon successful and full completion of the program.
The theme for summer 2027 is “the modern self.” By closely examining watershed literary works that have profoundly informed how selfhood is understood across a number of cultures, students will consider the relationship of self to society, the processes of fashioning and expressing selfhood, and the kinds of agency individuals have with regard to communities, social structures, and broad historical imperatives.
[cal] Program Dates:
Monday, July 5 - Friday, July 30, 2027
What to Expect
Divided into two parallel seminar groups, participants in the program will tackle one of two major, famously difficult literary texts–William Shakespeare’s Hamlet or James Joyce’s Ulysses–and read it with close guidance from Yale scholars while examining its resonances across cultures, languages, and historical periods.
Alongside seminar sessions devoted to deep reading and discussion of each respective text, all students will come together for structured workshops informed by the overarching theme of modern selfhood. These workshops will help program participants build sustained attention to long, difficult texts, hone their interpretive and critical skills, and introduce them to college writing in a range of genres. They will include writing labs, shared screen-free reading groups, introductions to working with archives, rare books, and art-related primary sources (paintings, prints, drawings, sculpture), guest lectures by additional Yale faculty, film screenings, and hands-on practice in printsetting, papermaking, and bookmaking, with each student making their individual chapbook and letterpress broadside.
Participants should expect to read about 200 pages a week and complete writing exercises every day while in session. They will be introduced to many of the greatest treasures of Yale’s collections, from first editions of Shakespeare’s plays, through Yale's extensive collection of modern art, to its remarkable film archive.
Beyond the classroom, students will live and learn in a vibrant residential community on Yale’s campus. Through shared meals, informal conversations, and co-curricular programming, they can build friendships with peers who are equally curious about literature and the larger questions it raises about society and the human experience. By the end of four weeks, students will leave with stronger analytical tools, greater confidence as writers and thinkers, and a deeper sense of what it means to pursue the humanities with rigor and imagination.
Seminar Descriptions
Seminar I: Hamlet & Its Afterlives
Instructor: Ayesha Ramachandran
A close, detailed reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, considered the first modern tragedy which transformed the course of Western literature and continues to inspire adaptations, responses, stagings, and reimaginings from across the globe. We will spend two weeks diving into Shakespeare’s play, its literary precursors, and its historical contexts, before engaging with three contemporary responses to it: Al-Hamlet Summit by British-Kuwaiti playwright Sulayman al-Bassam; a comic, Manga Hamlet, in the Japanese style; and Haider, an adaptation of Hamlet set in Kashmir. We will examine how Hamlet became an allegory for the drama of modern selfhood, its desires and constraints, and the tragedy of its self-assertion. Along the way, we will also discuss how Shakespeare became a cultural phenomenon, whether and why we should still be reading him today, and how the making of literary canons can move beyond the frameworks of nationhood and colonialism.
Seminar II: James Joyce’s Ulysses
Instructor: Marta Figlerowicz
This seminar offers a carefully scaffolded introduction to James Joyce’s groundbreaking modernist masterpiece. An adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey set in early twentieth-century Dublin, Joyce’s novel is also an encyclopedic romp through the history of Western culture, a bracing argument against nationalism and ethnocentrism, an examination of what counts as reality and how it can best be represented–and, last but not least, a deeply moving exploration of the intimacies and lonelinesses of friendship, first love, and marriage, the promises and disappointments of youthful talent, and the life of the artist. While Ulysses itself will take up most of our attention, we will consider it in relation to modernist music and art as well as Joyce’s other aesthetic influences and inspirations.
Faculty Profiles
Ayesha Ramachandran is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. A scholar of the early modern world, she explores the challenges posed by globalization from the late fifteenth century to the present. Her writing focuses on the making of worlds, of personhood, and of cross-cultural networks through interdisciplinary relations between art and science, particularly, poetry, philosophy, cartography, visual and print culture. She is the author of two books–the award-winning The Worldmakers (2015) and the forthcoming Lyric Thinking: Towards a Global Poetics (2027)--as well as several edited volumes. A recipient of various prizes and fellowships for her research and pedagogy, she regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses on Shakespeare, lyric poetry, cross-cultural encounters, and on global histories of the self.
Marta Figlerowicz is Professor of Comparative Literature at Yale University. Working in over ten languages, she has written extensively on the long history of the novel and twentieth- and twenty-first century film and literature across cultures and continents. Her books include Flat Protagonists (2016), Spaces of Feeling (2017), and the forthcoming It Must Be Possible: Modernity and Transcultural Knowledge (2027). A Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of prizes for her research and pedagogy, she regularly teaches undergraduate and graduate-level courses on James Joyce and on global histories of the self.
Eligibility
The Yale Summer Humanities Scholars Program is open only to students who will have completed their junior year (penultimate year) of high school, and will be at least 16 years old, by Sunday, July 4, 2027. High school graduates are not eligible.
Yale Summer Session cannot issue an I-20 for the Yale Summer Humanities Scholars Program. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or permanent residents, or already hold a valid F-1 visa that permits them to participate in the program.
The program includes a combination of morning and afternoon seminars and workshops scheduled throughout the week, along with substantial course preparation. Given the intensive nature of the program, students should not undertake other academic, professional, or significant personal commitments during the four weeks of participation.
Application
To apply, select the "Yale Summer Humanities Scholars Program" when completing your Yale Summer Session application. The Yale Summer Humanities Scholars Program has additional application requirements. Please see our Application Information page for details.
Program Costs and Financial Assistance
The Yale Summer Humanities Scholars Program has unique program costs, financial assistance, and refund policies. Please see our Tuition, Fees, and Financial Assistance page for details.